New Yiddish Library

Over the past ten years we’ve helped to co-publish ten critically acclaimed translations through our New Yiddish Library series at Yale University. These books are available in print and as eBooks.

At left is the New Yiddish Library's most recent title: Moyshe Kulbak's The Zelmenyaners, translated by Hillel Halkin. One of the great comic novels of the twentieth century, The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality.

Other New Yiddish Library titles include:

Jacob Glatstein. The Glatstein Chronicles, translated by Maier Deshell and edited by Ruth R. Wisse. In 1934, with World War II on the horizon, writer Jacob Glatstein (1896–1971) traveled from his home in America to his native Poland to visit his dying mother. One of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day, he used his journey as the basis for two highly autobiographical novellas (translated as The Glatstein Chronicles) in which he intertwines childhood memories with observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe.

The I. L. Peretz Reader, edited by Ruth R. Wisse. A new edition of this profound and influential writer’s work, which includes for the first time the expressionistic play A Night in the Old Marketplace.

Itzik Manger, The World According to Itzik, translated and edited by Leonard Wolf. Manger specialized in brilliant mischief – Bible stories rewritten with a heymish anachronism and glimpses of the politics of Paradise. This volume collects his best work.

S. Ansky,The Dybbuk and Other Writings, edited by David G. Roskies. Best known for his remarkable play The Dybbuk, Ansky was also an ethnographer and a keen observer of the Jewish world. This volume includes The Dybbuk, a number of short stories and sketches, and selections from Ansky’s First World War journal The Destruction of Galicia. To order this book...

Lamed Shapiro,“The Cross” and Other Jewish Stories, edited by Leah Garrett. Shapiro’s spare modernist fiction includes explosive stories of the Eastern European pogroms and critical portraits of life in America.

David Bergelson,The End of Everything, translated by Joseph Sherman. The most radically modernist Yiddish novel, which traces the ambivalence and despair of a refined and sensitive young woman trapped in a disintegrating social order.

Coming soon:

Listen and Believe: The Ghetto Reporting of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz, translated and edited by David Suchoff. Two brilliant journalists, Opoczynski in Warsaw and Zelkowicz in Lodz, chronicled the response of Jewish leaders and their people to the extraordinary circumstances of ghettoization under the Nazis. This volume collects a range of their work.

The New Yiddish Library is a joint project of the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature and the Yiddish Book Center. Additional support comes from the Kaplen Foundation and the Felix Posen Fund for the Translation of Modern Yiddish Literature.